Like that time when she came into the room and switched on the TV and the tower fell. Or the time that Cody, when he was real little, nearly choked and died—and probably would have, too, if she hadn’t been around to save him. It still makes me sick to think about that, because it was my fault it happened. I was feeding him, and I guess I hadn’t cut the pieces up small enough—I figured they were pretty small already. But then Cody got quiet and his eyes got this real scared look to them, like they were going to pop out of his head. It was fucked up because it wasn’t even like he choked or anything first. He just stayed quiet and then got even quieter and then his eyes were popping out of his head. I bolted for the phone and yelled for Tracy, but then before I could get to the phone even, Tracy was there, walking by me like she didn’t even see me—that look on her face. She went straight for the kid, turned him upside down, and started thumping him on the back, hard, until pretty soon the little piece of chicken that had got stuck in his throat shot out of his mouth, and he was crying and puking all over the floor.
You useless piece of shit, Tracy said, without looking at me. By the time anyone got around to coming over here in an ambulance it would have been too late. Don’t you know that? Then she scooped up Cody and took him off to the bathroom to get him cleaned up.
The piece of chicken had flown clear across the room and landed right beside my foot. I remember that after she left, and took the kid, I just sat down on the floor next to it and looked at it, and thought about how small it was, and how you never knew what it was that was going to fuck you. How you had to be prepared for every little thing.
* * *
—
After my third tour I had that pain in my gut all the time. It was funny, because it didn’t happen to me in the field. Over there, I felt strong and I didn’t give a shit. A lot of guys get scared. If they’ve seen combat, or had any close calls, they start to feel like everything they see is going to jump up and bite them. But I wasn’t like that. See, I wasn’t afraid of dying—it wasn’t that. It was everything else. When I was home I would start to feel it all over again. I couldn’t help it. I’d start thinking about how everything was all connected. I mean, how every little thing that happened would set off something else happening. And how that would set off something else, and that if I died there was nothing I could do to stop all the shit that my dying would set off in the world without knowing, ahead of time, what it would be.
I started thinking more about that ad Dean had read. I thought about how funny it would be to be sitting up on the shelf. Just ready and waiting up there for shit to happen. To be hard and cold as metal, all loaded and ready inside Tracy’s Taurus 1911, which I had got her, and which she knew how to use. I started thinking about it all the time. How it would feel to be inside that gun, with her hand on the trigger. But then when I really did have her hands on me I would get that icepick feeling again and if she was on top of me I’d have to push her off because I couldn’t breathe. It got to be pretty bad that way, because she would get hurt like maybe I didn’t love her anymore, or didn’t think she was sexy, and I would tell her, no, that wasn’t it, it was just this thing that I couldn’t explain and it didn’t have anything to do with her—not really. But women always think that everything is about them and so she would turn over and cry and say, for the fifth time, Don’t you think I’m sexy, or what? And I would tell her again how she was the sexiest woman in the world, and that she should know that. I knew she did. Everywhere we went people were always checking her out and I knew that she noticed. That she liked it, even.
Who wouldn’t?
Most of the time, I didn’t mind. Sometimes, though—especially when we went to Galveston Island, where her best friend Anelise Hutson’s brother, Brian, had a place—I did. She would wear this tiny little bikini, show off, and everyone would look at her—including Brian. There was just something about that guy—the way that he looked at her—that gave me the creeps. I don’t know why because it wasn’t like I was jealous. I had no reason to be. He was just this skinny dude with a paunch who didn’t do anything all day except sit out on his front porch and answer the phone. Seriously. He owned a Sea-Doo rental place just outside of town, and then his house was a few miles past that, but he hardly ever went into the store. He had these young guys working for him there, so I guess he didn’t need to. Instead, he would sit around at home all day answering his phone. The way he talked about it, it was as if the Sea-Doo rental business was the most important thing on the face of the planet. The ringer on his phone was never turned on—it would just vibrate in his pocket and every time it vibrated he’d jump up and, real exaggerated, mouth out “Sorry,” then take the call. It was so fucking stupid. He’d actually mouth the word, even before he’d picked up the phone.
Except for that, though, I liked the beach. And we were lucky to know someone who had a house literally right on the water. The house was stuck up on stilts and sometimes after it stormed or when the tide came in high, the water would rush right up under the deck. I liked sitting out there. Tracy was right—it helped me relax. We’d take chairs and put them in the shallow water and drink beer with our feet stuck in the sand. I’d build sandcastles with Cody and then help knock them down, or take a magazine down with me and stick my nose in it so I didn’t have to pretend to care about whatever Brian was saying. He was always saying stupid shit to Anelise and Tracy whenever he wasn’t saying it into the phone.
But when I came back after my third tour it was winter and so we didn’t go to the beach, and I didn’t relax. Tracy kept bugging me to see a shrink, but I told her it wasn’t that sort of a thing.
Well what sort of a thing is it? she wanted to know.
I was pretty sure she had told her friends about me by then—about how we weren’t even really sleeping together anymore. I just sort of felt it. You know, like when we’d be hanging out with Anelise, I could feel that she knew. Maybe even Brian knew. It made me sick to think about that, and so finally I agreed. I got an appointment with a shrink at Fort Sam and drove up the next day.
It was a lady shrink—a blonde. Her hair was done up real complicated on the top of her head and sprayed into place. It didn’t even look real. For an hour, I sat in her office and she smiled at me and nodded and whatever I said she wrote down in this little notebook she had. It was all pretty normal, she said, everything I was saying. I said, This isn’t any PTSD shit, if that’s what you’re thinking. I know how I am and I do not even give a shit when I am out there, so it’s not that. And she nodded and said that was normal, too.
I started to hate her. The way she sat there, smiling and nodding, and how when she nodded not one single hair moved out of place on her head. I figured that all that attention to her hair was probably intended to distract from the fact that she was overweight, and not that attractive overall. After she was done with me she was probably going to drive over to Kroger’s to stock up on diet foods. She was probably thinking about that right now. I started to get mad, thinking about it myself. Why was it always fat people who dieted? Why didn’t they ever get thin?
Tracy could eat anything she wanted. Even when she was pregnant, she didn’t get fat—not even a little bit. It wasn’t that I cared about it one way or the other, this shrink being fat or not. It just showed a lack of resolve. That was the problem with the whole goddamn country. Sitting there in the shrink’s office, it started to become very clear. Nobody really gave a shit. They said they did, but they didn’t. Everyone was just sitting around, getting fat and soft and not giving a shit, while all the while—guess what? Everyone else was getting mean and hard.
While I was thinking about this, the shrink was setting up a video game on her big-screen TV and telling me how to work the functions on the control pad she’d given me like I’d never played a video game before in my life. The game was pretty much the same as the ones we’d used in Basic, actually—except a lot cheaper. You know how I could tell? There weren’t any shadows. You need shadows to make things look r
eal. The cheap games don’t bother.
So I take the control from the shrink and I’m wandering around, blowing shit up, and every time I detonate she’s saying, How does this make you feel? And I’m saying, Like this is a cheap piece of shit. My kid still buys the fucking Easter bunny and he wouldn’t buy this.
And that’s when it hit me. What’s wrong with me. How come every time I come home this weird shit starts happening. There’s no fucking shadows! You go to Kroger’s—or to Target, or the mall, or the fucking dentist office. You stay home even, in your own house, with the fluorescent light in the kitchen and the blinds closed to save on air conditioning. There weren’t any shadows anywhere!
I started to get freaked out then, thinking about it. Like maybe nothing was even fucking real, and I just got up, the shrink still smiling and nodding, and went home. Tracy was there. She said, How did it go? But I didn’t say anything.
I went into the kitchen instead. I was right. There was not one fucking shadow. Tracy followed me in there, but I turned around and headed into the TV room, where Cody was sitting on the couch playing Darksiders. I sat down beside him and started to watch. The game is actually pretty boring, but it’s all right for a kid. You play one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and have to try to balance the forces of heaven and hell. If you’re lucky, you make it to Endwar and you get to punish anyone who’s still stuck on Earth. The kid was doing okay, but I didn’t think he was going to make it to Endwar. Pretty soon Tracy came in and stood right in front of the screen. She had one hip stuck out, like she wanted to start something. The kid kept playing. He had to lean around sideways so he could see around her legs.
You’re not even trying, she said.
Get out of the way, I said. The kid can’t see.
She kept standing there. That look on her face.
That’s when I lost it. I don’t even know what I said. I didn’t care half the time because I was thinking, It doesn’t even matter, this isn’t even fucking real. But then all of a sudden it was. Tracy was grabbing Cody up from the couch and stuffing his arms into his jacket. It was January and it was pretty cold outside. She was saying, Fuck you, you know that? Fuck you. I’m sick of this shit. Then she put on her own coat, grabbed her car keys off the little hook by the door, and was gone.
* * *
—
She didn’t come home that night, or the next. I kept waiting for her, you know. Like an idiot. Expecting her—every moment. But she didn’t come. I stayed inside, with the blinds drawn, and I waited. I tried to read some Meditations but I couldn’t keep the words straight on the page. Nothing made any sense. I played Darksiders because it was still in the PlayStation and I couldn’t be bothered to change the game, but I kept winning. It wasn’t even fun anymore.
When Tracy didn’t come home by eight o’clock on Sunday, I called her mom’s place. I was angry by then, and had just started to say something like, This is fucked, she can’t steal the kid, when Tracy’s mom said she hadn’t seen her and didn’t know a thing about it. I was about to call Anelise when…I didn’t need to anymore.
I don’t know how I knew, but I did. I jumped in the car and I drove all the way to Galveston. It took me just a little less than twenty minutes. Usually it takes half an hour or more, depending on traffic, but I was driving pretty fast.
I didn’t slow down till I was past Galveston. I thought at first maybe I wouldn’t recognize the street, but I recognized it all right. I turned in and drove just far enough so I could see the drive, and sure enough there was Tracy’s car parked right out front. Even though I already knew I would find it there, it still felt pretty bad when I did. It felt so bad that I got out of the car and puked in the culvert. Then I got back in, turned the car around, and started driving again. I was shaking all over. I thought I should pull over I was shaking so bad, but I kept driving. I drove all the way into town, shaking like that, then I pulled over on the seawall and ordered a beer at this one place where I could sit outside. No one else was out there, it was too cold, but I sat out there for a long time, and just looked out across the highway to where the ocean stretched out, flat and hard looking, in all directions. It was sort of hard to tell where it ended and the sky began, and I could see the rigs out there and because it was just starting to get dark their lights were shining so that it looked like they were the first stars. I made a wish on one of them—just like I always had Cody do whenever I was with him and we saw the first star come into the sky for real. I wished that I was a bullet, and that I was at that very moment coursing through Brian Hutson’s body. That I was that hard and sharp and dark and that I was just then being slowed, only very slightly, by Brian Hutson’s cranial bone; just then being splashed with spinal fluid as I severed the connective tissue between his skull and the soft tissue of his brain; just then interrupting the information travelling between his nervous system and his heart.
I sat there for a long time, wishing that. By then it had got dark and real stars had come out in the sky. I realized I was chilled to the bone, that I had only drunk half of my beer, and that the kid that was serving me was looking at me funny. I got up and paid and drove back home and all the time I was thinking hard.
I already had a pretty good plan, but I wanted to be extra-certain because after you’re dead it’s even harder to make sure that things go according to plan than when you are not. Dean was going to be back in town in a few days, and I was glad about that. I knew I could count on him to help me think the whole thing through again—then to carry it out.
The first thing I needed to do was place my order with the company in Alabama. I’d order fifty shotshells for Dean’s Smith and Wesson and two hundred for Tracy’s Taurus. I wanted to make sure she’d have plenty left over after I was gone. I’d arrange for it all in my will, so there wouldn’t be any mistake. Make sure that the shells—when they were ready—would be sent to Dean’s address in Mission Bend, and not to Tracy. That way he could go to Brian’s house and shoot off thirty or so rounds into Brian’s body before delivering the rest of the ACPs to Tracy so she could put some in her Taurus—and still have plenty left to put up on the shelf.
The more I thought about it, the more certain I was I could carry it off. It was really very simple, I thought. The plan pretty much foolproof. After I was dead, Dean would call Brian and tell him who he was. Nothing but the truth: he was a friend of mine; had something to personally deliver, on my behalf. It was my parting wish—some bullshit like that. You could pretty much guarantee that a guy like Brian wouldn’t say no.
If Dean waited awhile—a couple of weeks, maybe—then arrived on a weekday, any time before six, I figured chances were pretty good that Tracy would be back at work and Cody would be at his grandmother’s house, like usual. Dean could chit-chat with Brian a bit, and then—before he got into any of the really dirty business—get him to empty the safe, which I knew for a fact he kept upstairs. That way it would be Brian and not me that would end up compensating Dean for his trouble. All of my insurance money would go to Tracy instead.
The only real risk that I could foresee was if anyone happened to be around when Dean arrived at the house, but I figured the chances of it were pretty slim and that, if Dean didn’t feel right about it—and especially if Tracy’s car was there—he could always just turn around and come back another time. Or call up on his cell and tell Brian he was running late or something, then just wait around until the coast was clear. I could just picture him. Pulled off on the side of the road out there, chanting Sun Tzu or some shit.
But Brian didn’t have many friends, and that time of year those roads off the main highway were pretty desolate, especially during the week, so I didn’t think he’d need to bother. No one would hear the shots and no one would see him either come or go. There was always the possibility that something else could go wrong, of course—something that I wasn’t thinking of, and couldn’t foresee—but the more I thought about it the more clear it became to me that you had to take certain risks in de
ath, just like in life, and that now all I had to do was wait.
Even just thinking about it, now—inside my own house, with the lights on and the blinds closed—I start to feel it. It’s like I’m already hurtling at 3200 feet per second to lodge myself behind an ear. To enter at the throat, the belly, the knee, the heart. If Dean discharges thirty bullets into Brian Hutson’s body, roughly 0.2 ounces of my own body will be left inside his. This is not a lot when you think about it, but sometimes it’s the smallest things—the things you least suspect—that turn out to matter the most.
It’s the details, see, the shadows, that make a thing real, and the moment that Brian Hutson feels the first bullet lodge in his chest—or even in the split-second flash right before it hits—he will know this, too. He will feel, for the first time in his life, how everything has a purpose.
How brief it will all be—yet how final. I wait for Dean to show up, and I think about that. About how at the very end there will just be that question. For what purpose then art thou? About how, for a single, unmeasurable moment as I whistle through Brian Hutson’s body, I will be with that question.
Before—in another moment, still less measurable than the first—he will respond to that question with a question of his own. A question that will seem, for that briefest of moments, like an answer. Before all questions are finally extinguished. As it is the nature of questions—and all things—to be.
THE DOOR IS OPEN. The small boy leans his weight into it, and enters, the tall boy behind him. A breeze sweeps across the room as the boys enter, without—somehow—disturbing any air.
The room is not clean, and the outside air is no match for the smell—which is really more like an object than a smell. Though not like an object that can be easily removed.
Tiger, Tiger Page 11
